Pop’s West wins behind Kobe’s 37

LOS ANGELES — There was a game within the 60th NBA All-Star Game at Staples Center on Sunday, and it had nothing to do with which player would emerge as Most Valuable Player.

With the New York Knicks’ pursuit of Carmelo Anthony, the Denver Nuggets forward who started for the Western Conference, sharing the spotlight with nearly every event all weekend, the game itself became a bit of a morality play.

Would the Eastern Conference squad, with seven players from the Celtics and Heat, prevail over a Western squad that featured seven players from small-market teams?

The Hollywood ending Sunday: Triumph for the little guys.

The Western Conference emerged with a 148-143 victory over the Eastern Conference, a small triumph for small-market teams trying to remain competitive against a rising tide of player movement to the league’s largest cities.

He got plenty of help from a teammate from one of the smallest markets in the league.

Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant scored 34 points for the winning team, coached this year by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who will return to San Antonio today to prepare a small-market team with the best record in the entire league for its final 26 games of the regular season.

Durant scored seven points in the final 2:19, after the Eastern Conference trimmed what had been a 17-point West lead to two.

“It was a good game in the fourth quarter, and being a competitive player, I enjoyed that,” Durant said.

Bryant played 29 minutes and 21 seconds and put up 26 shots. The energy he expended early, especially on several dunks, left him with little for the exciting finish.

“What you saw tonight was me being around young players,” Bryant said. “If you want to know the influence of Blake (Griffin), look at all the dunks I had tonight. By the end, I had nothing left. I had exceeded my dunk quota for the game.”

Spurs guard Manu Ginobili of the West All-Stars had seven points, five assists, three rebounds, and three steals Sunday. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press)

Griffin, the Clippers rookie who won Saturday’s slam-dunk contest, had three crowd-pleasing dunks, one in the fourth quarter after the hometown crowd chanted “We want Blake” to impel Popovich to return him to the floor.

“We were about one minute from getting him back into the game anyway,” said Popovich, who had emphatically waved Griffin from the bench after the chants began.

There were highlights aplenty Sunday, including the dunks by Griffin and a triple-double for Miami’s LeBron James, who scored 29 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and handed out 10 assists.

Popovich’s West team ran off 76 first-half points, enough for a 12-point lead, then secured the victory with 72 more in the second.

Spurs captain Tim Duncan made his 12th consecutive All-Star start, but it was mostly symbolic. Popovich played his 34-year-old future Hall of Famer only 11 minutes and 40 seconds. He scored only two points but was a facilitator for more spectacular teammates. One of his three rebounds produced a long outlet pass to Bryant for a spectacular dunk. After another rebound, he passed up an easy shot near the basket to feed Utah’s Deron Williams, who nailed a 3-pointer.

Duncan didn’t play at all in the fourth quarter but stayed involved in the game. During a timeout with 8:03 remaining, his team up by 15, Duncan joined Popovich and his assistant coaches in their huddle and helped them draw up a play.

Spurs guard Manu Ginobili, making his second All-Star appearance six years after his first, got more of a run from his coach. He played nearly 21 minutes and produced a Ginobili-esque line: seven points, five assists, three rebounds, and three steals.

And Anthony? The Nuggets star did little for the West in what may have been his final appearance for a team representing that portion of the United States West of the Mississippi, scoring only eight points.

The East's Amar'e Stoudemire, of the Knicks, goes up for a shot as the Spurs' Tim Duncan, playing for the West, defends during the first half of the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2011, in Los Angeles. (Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press)